Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche Quotes (267 Quotes)

God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers -- at bottom, merely a gross prohibition for us you shall not think.

The great lie about immortality destroys every kind of reason, every kind of naturalness in the instincts.

Compassion for the friend should conceal itself under a hard shell

Growth in wisdom may be exactly measured by decrease in bitterness

Living in a constant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion

The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world.

What is wanted -- whether this is admitted or not -- is nothing less than a fundamental remolding, indeed weakening and abolition of the individual one never tires of enumerating and indicating all that is evil and inimical, prodigal, costly, extravagant in the form individual existence has assumed hitherto, one hopes to manage more cheaply, more safely, more equitably, more uniformly if there exist only large bodies and their members.

From what you would know and measure, you must take leave, at least for a time. Only after having left town, you see how high its towers rise above the houses .

We praise or blame as one or the other affords more opportunity for exhibiting our power of judgment.

A high civilization is a pyramid it can stand only on a broad base its primary prerequisite is a strong and soundly consolidated mediocrity.

He divines remedies against injuries he knows how to turn serious accidents to his own advantage whatever does not kill him makes him stronger.

The strength required for the vision of the most powerful reality is not only compatible with the most powerful strength for action, for monstrous action, for crime -- it even presupposes it.

Faith, indeed, has up to the present not been able to move real mountains . . . But it can put mountains where there are none.

People who comprehend a thing to its very depths rarely stay faithful to it forever. For they have brought its depths into the light of day and in the depths there is always much that is unpleasant to see.

Joyous distrust is a sign of health. Everything absolute belongs to pathology.

Much that is dreadful and inhuman in history, much that one hardly likes to believe, is mitigated by the reflection that the one who commands and the one who carries out are different people. The former does not behold the sight and does not experience the strong impression on the imagination. The latter obeys a superior and therefore feels no responsibility for the acts.

Many people wait throughout their whole lives for the chance to be good in their own fashion.

With the unknown, one is confronted with danger, discomfort, and care the first instinct is to abolish these painful states. First principle any explanation is better than none. . . . The causal instinct is thus conditional upon, and excited by, the feeling of fear. The why shall, if at all possible, not give the cause for its own sake so much as for a particular kind of cause -- a cause that is comforting, liberating, and relieving.

When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is usually something wrong with her sexuality

I no longer want to walk on worn soles.

Women are quite able to make friends with a man but to preserve such a friendship - that no doubt requires the assistance of a slight physical antipathy

The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more you must allure the senses to it.

Love is more afraid of change than destruction.

How poor the human mind would be without vanity It resembles a well stocked and ever renewed ware-emporium that attracts buyers of every class they can find almost everything, have almost everything, provided they bring with them the right kind of money -- admiration.

Not infrequently, one encounters copies of important people and, as with paintings, most people prefer the copy to the original.

The grand style follows suit with all great passion. It disdains to please, it forgets to persuade. It commands. It wills.

To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth.

Scholars spend all of their energies on saying Yes and No, on criticism of what others have thought -- they themselves no longer think.

Belief means not wanting to know what is true.

Everyone who enjoys thinks that the principal thing to the tree is the fruit, but in point of fact the principal thing to it is the seed. -- Herein lies the difference between them that create and them that enjoy.

There would be more good marriages if the marriage partners didn't live together.

Everything that is ponderous, vicious and pompously clumsy, all long-winded and wearying kinds of style, are developed in great variety among Germans

Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him.

Is Wagner actually a man Is he not rather a disease Everything he touches falls ill he has made music sick

All idealism is falsehood in the face of necessity

If one considers what need people have of an external regulation to constrain and steady them, how compulsion, slavery in a higher sense, is the sole and final condition under which the person of weaker will can prosper then one understands the nature of conviction, faith.

When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole. It stands or falls with faith in God.

I should account as the foremost musician one who knew only the sadness of the most profound happiness, and no other sadness at all.

Deep is the well of truth and long does it take to know what has fallen into its depths

And so while dreams are the individual man's play with reality, the sculptor's art is (in a broader sense) the play with dreams.

How much truth can a spirit bear, how much truth can a spirit dare ... that became for me more and more the real measure of value.

Our vanity is most difficult to wound just when our pride has been wounded.

The vanity of others runs counter to our taste only when it runs counter to our vanity

Not to him who is offensive to us are we most unfair, but to him who doth not concern us at all

The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm usually because they could not walk.

One must never have spared oneself, one must have acquired hardness as a habit to be cheerful and in good spirits in the midst of nothing but hard truths.

I do not give alms I am not poor enough for that.

Your soul will be dead even before your body fear nothing further.

To win over certain people to something, it is only necessary to give it a gloss of love of humanity, nobility, gentleness, self-sacrifice -- and there is nothing you cannot get them to swallow.

Winter, a bad guest, sitteth with me at home blue are my hands with his friendly handshaking